In the digital age, organizations increasingly depend on a variety of data protection functions (e.g., continuous data protection, data replication, etc.) to protect and preserve their data. These organizations may operate under a variety of constraints (financial, technical, institutional, legal, etc.) which may increase their need for flexibility in structuring their data protection solutions. For example, an organization may wish for a single storage appliance to provide multiple data protection functions to a production system.
If storage for the production system is provisioned by a storage area network (“SAN”), the storage appliance may provide data protection functions by directly accessing data from the SAN. However, if storage for the production system is provisioned by direct-attached storage (“DAS”), the storage appliance must access data through the production system. Accordingly, when a data protection function needs to sync with the production storage, the production system may read data from the production storage and send the data to the storage appliance. However, the production system may also be configured to mirror application data writes made to the production storage to the storage appliance. With traditional techniques, if one data protection function attempts to sync with the production storage while the production system mirrors application data writes to another data protection function, the synchronization data may be treated as mirrored application data. In the case of continuous data protection, this may result in losing the snapshot history. In the case of replication, treating synchronization data as mirrored application data may result in unnecessary network traffic.
Furthermore, synchronizing data for data protection functions using traditional technologies may slow down the production system and require throttling synchronization communications to allow active data protection functions to stay active (e.g., to continue to receive mirrored application data). For example, a continuous data protection synchronization that would normally only take a few hours may take weeks if throttled to allow an active replication function to remain active. Accordingly, the instant disclosure identifies a need for simultaneously providing multiple data protection functions efficiently and effectively.